If there's anything out there with the power to resurrect the idea of making Hellboy 3, it's the power of the Internet! Last year, fantastical filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said that a third installment would never happen, and we all grew to accept this. However, Ron Perlman, who plays the hulking cigar-smoking devil in the films, has taken to social media to get the fans involved. Could there be hope for this thing yet?
Perlman released a statement on both his official Twitter and Facebook accounts, calling for the fans to make Hellboy 3 a trending topic and, therefore, telling Hollywood that this needs to happen.
Even Doug Jones, a frequent Del Toro collaborator who played the aquatic Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, threw his support behind Perlman's efforts to drum up buzz.
Hellboy 3 had been rumored to happen for quite some time, with both Del Toro and his actors teasing its possibility. However, the director dashed fan hopes in a Reddit AMA in July of last year. Although he would love to do it from a creative standpoint, he wrote that it's been virtually impossible to finance Hellboy 3 from the studio's end. That said, the Internet is a powerful force that, when shown proper patronage, can offer its users the ellusive viral boost. Deadpool, for one, was merely something Tim Miller and Ryan Reynolds wanted to do but couldn't get Fox on board. Then the test footage happened to leak online, go viral and now Reynolds has wrapped principal photography on the X-Men spinoff for a 2016 release. Then there are projects like The Leviathan, which is being made at Fox with Neill Blomkamp and Simon Kinberg after a short proof of concept racked up millions of views on Vimeo. Could the same happen to Hellboy 3, should online-based fans drum up sufficient buzz?
Should the hoped for trilogy finally conclude, we already have an idea of what it will entail. Over the course of the two films, Red has been faced with his ultimate destiny, to herald the apocalypse on Earth. Back during that Reddit AMA, Del Toro said his idea for Hellboy 3 is to have our hero finally come to terms and embrace this destiny, becoming a much darker being in order to save humanity against the latest threat. At the time, he said he didn't think it would happen, but that's what some of us thought about Pacific Rim 2, and that has a release date for August 2017.
Stranger things than Hellboy 3 have happened, so never say never.
